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Well, we released our latest research, the Market IQ on Findability yesterday (Got Find Yet?), but the research drumbeat marches ever onward!

It's a big world of content, information, knowledge, and process, and for Q3, we're tackling a more process-centric view of the world.

Specifically, our next topic covers the world of Business Process Management (BPM), Workflow, and the ties of processes (automated or manual) to specific business concerns.

If business process (fill-in-the-blank) is something that fires you up, let me start to whet your appetite for the topic by pointing you to a free report that was published by AIIM last year, right around the time that Carl and I came onboard to start Market Intelligence.

Any information that you're dying to have statistics/findings on in the world of process, feel free to comment away here and on some specific subsequent posts I'll regarding what solution providers should be considered "in the BPM fold," what standards matter for process, how success is measured in BPM projects, what methodologies are in use, what systems and applications are (or should be) typically integrated within a BPM project, etc..

Recently Intalio, Inc., an Open
Source BPMS company, announced Intalio|On Demand, an open
source Business Process Management System delivered as a service.
Intalio|On Demand is available by signing up at www.intalio.com/on-demand.
The subscription for the service starts at $1,500 for each dedicated
server, and includes bandwidth, licenses, maintenance, and support.
Users can receive a free 5-day evaluation. (more info at Intalio.com)

The three biggest movements within the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) world, and Business Process Management (BPM) - whether integrated into or stand-alone from ECM - are:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Open Source

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)

(Note: While MOSS is not typically associated with "high-end" BPM offerings, the impact of MOSS on the market, now that Microsoft has realized they can apparently make a billion dollars USD a year on that platform without seriously trying, means that it is a force to be reckoned with, and in many cases, the light-weight BPM provided by MOSS can accomplish most of what typical enterprises are expecting for entry-point workflow that is non-transactional and not at a high-volume.)

These burgeoning movements are not mutually exclusive, and one should not expect that traditonally licensed, on-premise solutions are going to disappear any time soon.

What makes this announcement by Intalio intriguing is this ability to mix and match the solution, based on the deploying customer's need.

While it is not terribly rare to "host" open source with a third party, truly architecting an "on-demand" or SaaS offering is a bit more complicated than installing and running a new instance, and it does appear that this is the first marriage of Open Source and SaaS.

Is this the best of both worlds? Hard to say this early in this model, but as a conceptual model, it would seem to be path to take moving forward.

This use of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (known as EC2) is relatively rare for "enterprise" applications (vs. the consumer-oriented usage of so many of the Web 2.0 startups, such as twitter) at this point, and given some of the issues of Amazon's cloud infrastructure blacking out in recent months, this is by no means a bulletproof solution. But nothing is, and the illusion of perfect uptime is preventing traditional IT shops from taking advantage of the speed and flexibility that SaaS has to offer. The ability to layer solutions with both on-premise and cloud-based solutions is a model that has been proven to work. Akamai as one of the pioneers in providing an elastic/scalable ability to provide fast access to large multimedia files is part of what has made Apple's iTunes Music Store the success that it has been.

Given Intalio's adherence to (and apparent dedication to) open standards for connecting between systems, one should hope that the ability to mix and match Intalio's offerings, under the hood, should be fairly seamless. Whether you start with the on-demand model, or the on-premise, the nature of BPM and BPM as "process glue" makes this a perfect meta-layer where the architecture SHOULD be possible to modularize.

Both buyers and suppliers should keep an eye on this model, and consider the ramifications from a budget standpoint, flexibility in deployment, and time to deliver new offerings, or upgrade existing technology-based solutions.

Pascal Marmier is the Advisor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship with SHARE (www.shareboston.org) - the Swiss House for Advanced Research and Education, based in Cambridge, MA. The mission of SHARE is essentially to facilitate collaboration across academic, commercial and governmental lines, both for Switzerland and Swiss people, globally, but also within the local regions in which they have offices and experimental labs specifically built to create cross-pollinated conversations amongst all of these groups.

We discuss a bit of an idea Pascal has coined as "open-source diplomacy" which certainly falls well within the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 movements - perhaps this is Diplomacy 2.0? From closed door and back room diplomacy to transparent conversation, this is an extremely interesting conversation, and following in the Global Innovation theme I've been pursuing in recent interviews. Anyone involved in similar work, whether diplomatic in nature, or related in this "meme" - please do get in touch via comments to the blog (www.BizTechTalk.com), or find me via LinkedIn, and I would very much like to hear from you, and continue this ongoing dialogue.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at our (AIIM), Advisory Trade Member Executive Summit in Chicago on 9/12/2007.

Embedded below (or via slideshare.net) are the raw slides for my portion of the kick-off - for those who wanted a copy, or are interested in some of thoughts I'm having these days on the "old world" of ECM, and the "new world" and future state. This was a "hyper keynote" of 43 slides, which I believe I managed to do in about 12 minutes. I did not capture the audio at the time, so am playing around with a post-edited version with audio (and animation) so you can get the full effect.

As always, would love feedback on the presentation (particularly if you were there - as the slides themselves don't tell the entire story), and your thoughts overall on the impact of open-source, SaaS (software as a service), wikis, blogs, and RSS - all in an "enterprise" context, rather than individual/personal context.

Think Before You Spend, Mindmapping for Marketing - an interview with Dr. Ian Howells, Chief Marketing Officer with Alfresco.com - an open-source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution provider. This interview focuses on mindmapping, how Ian uses it in everyday work and life, and also tangents off into open-source versus closed solutions, David vs. Goliath, Crossing the Chasm, and several other topics. Great fun, this ranks as one of my favorite podcasts of the 18 or so that I've recorded thus far. Enjoy and discuss!

Interview of John Newton, CTO and Co-founder of commercial open source content management provider, Alfresco. We discuss failures of traditional ECM solutions, the race to complexity and return of simplicity, agile development, and a host of other topics.